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Updated: Sep 5, 2025

An Analog Macroscopic Technique for Studying Molecular Hydrodynamic Processes in Dense Gases and Liquids
Published on: December 4, 2017
Local Plastic Response and Slow Heterogeneous Dynamics of Supercooled Liquids
Yan-Wei Li1, Yugui Yao1, Massimo Pica Ciamarra2
1Key Laboratory of Advanced Optoelectronic Quantum Architecture and Measurement (MOE), School of Physics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China.
Abstract:
We demonstrate, via numerical simulations, that the relaxation dynamics of supercooled liquids correlates well with a plastic length scale measuring a particle's response to impulsive localized perturbations and weakly to measures of local elasticity. We find that the particle averaged plastic length scale vanishes linearly in temperature and controls the super-Arrhenius temperature dependence of the relaxation time. Furthermore, we show that the plastic length scale of individual particles correlates with their typical displacement at the relaxation time. In contrast, the local elastic response only correlates with the dynamics on the vibrational timescale.
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